Free Republic

One can identify individuals whom the establishment fears simply by paying attention to those whom the establishment media attacks. Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, seems to have learned how to handle the lying media. Wednesday morning on the social media platform X, Hegseth posted his letter of acceptance to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, as a preemptive rebuttal to what he described as a forthcoming hit piece from a leftist news outlet. “We understand that ProPublica (the Left Wing hack group) is planning to publish a knowingly false report that...

WASHINGTON — Foreign leaders have lined up to speak with him. He has rattled Mexico and Canada with threats of steep tariffs and warned there would be “hell to pay” for militants in Gaza unless they release the hostages by the time he’s sworn in.That won't happen for another 45 days, but Donald Trump, the president-in-waiting, isn't shying away from acting like the president-in-reality.Trump can't sign a bill or issue an executive order yet, but he is crowding out Joe Biden as the sitting president winds down his term and steadily recedes from public view. In two foreign trips since...

The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led more than 100 Nobel Prizes and has supported more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019.No surprise, then, that the agency has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But come January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the N.I.H. may face a reckoning.Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new administration’s selection for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which...

Former female sports greats, media figures, and even a conservative lawmaker tore into a recent New York Times article for referring to women as “non-transgender women.” Tennis legend Martina Navratilova and other prominent people blasted the piece online for the characterization, stating the outlet should just be referring to biological women as women. “NYT- you stink. We are women, NOT TRANSGENDER WOMEN. Just WOMEN will do in the future,” Navratilova wrote on the social media platform on Friday. The Times published an article Thursday which documented the inner turmoil of a women’s college volleyball team – the San Jose State...

President-elect Donald Trump is coming for the executive branch. Eight years ago, he thought he could shake up federal agencies and left after four years with little to show for it. This time, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the charge, he is talking about even more radical changes. Will he do any better the second time around? Trump isn’t the first president to try to shrink or reorganize the executive branch, or the first to claim to be leading an assault on waste, fraud and abuse that would deliver significant cost savings and more efficient government. Richard M....

President-elect Donald Trump wasted little time selecting another candidate for attorney general after Matt Gaetz dropped his bid amid sexual misconduct allegations. Pam Bondi, Florida's attorney general for eight years, was part of Trump's defense team during his first impeachment trial and supported his false claims of fraud following the 2020 election. She's remained in Trump's orbit since then, continuing to advise him on legal matters. Despite the shake-up, Bondi seems easily positioned to pick up the mantle on Trump's goal of overhauling the Justice Department and his pledge for retribution against political opponents. "For too long, the partisan Department...

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump's pick for defense secretary, was investigated for an alleged sexual assault in 2017 but no charges were filed. The alleged incident took place in the early morning hours of Oct. 8, 2017, at the address of the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa in Monterey, California, the city said in a statement. The police department investigated 'an alleged sexual assault' involving Hegseth, a Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran, that was reported four days later, according to the statement. The victim's name and age are confidential. No weapons were involved, according to the statement,...

Americans are fed up with the price of food, and many are looking to President-elect Donald Trump to lower their grocery bills. Trump often railed on the campaign trail against hefty price increases for bacon, cereal, crackers and other items. “We’ll get them down,” he told shoppers during a September visit to a Pennsylvania grocery store. But the food price inflation that stunned the U.S. — and other parts of the world — in 2021 and 2022 had complicated causes that are difficult to unwind, from the pandemic to the Ukraine war to avian flu. And many economists think Trump’s...

Tech billionaire Elon Musk was handed a major win Tuesday evening when President-elect Donald Trump announced that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO would co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” with Vivek Ramaswamy. The announcement reinforces the closeness that Musk has managed to achieve with Trump, even after the election. But for some people in Trump’s orbit, Musk’s presence has felt overbearing. Musk has been so aggressive in pushing his views about Trump’s second term that he’s stepping on the toes of Trump’s transition team and may be overstaying his welcome at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the...

Senate Republicans reacted with alarm and dismay to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s decision to nominate Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, for attorney general, and several said they were skeptical...

Donald Trump has been president before. But all indications are that we should expect an even bolder Trump — or more extreme, depending on your point of view — in a second term. Gone will be the many establishment-oriented administration officials who served as checks on him and have since criticized him. Republicans will most likely control both chambers of Congress, with GOP contingents more Trump-y than before. The Supreme Court recently gave presidents a substantial degree of criminal immunity, which will insulate a president who has been convicted of felonies and charged with others. And Trump as a term-limited...

President-elect Donald Trump's recently announced pick for "border czar," Tom Homan, has an "extreme and ineffective" track record, according to the former homeland security adviser to Mike Pence. Trump wrote on Truth Social late Sunday that he was "pleased to announce" that Homan, his former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, "will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation's Borders." Trump said Homan "will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin," in addition to overseeing the northern and southern borders and "all Maritime, and Aviation Security." On...

The price of an $80 pair of blue jeans spiking to $90 or even $96. A pair of $90 gym shoes rising to $116. A $1,500 mid-tier couch rising to over $1,600. The rising costs of these three household items may seem like examples of Bidenomics at work over the last four years. But if that’s what you’re thinking, think again. These are the kinds of price increases American consumers can expect if President-elect Donald Trump proceeds with some of the tariff proposals he floated on the campaign trail this year, according to a new report from the National Retail...

The recriminations are flying, as Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s forces go to war over who’s more to blame for Democrats’ humiliating defeat Tuesday. So long as the left is pointing fingers, let it direct a big, fat digit at the outfit that played the biggest role in losing it this election: the U.S. media. That isn’t the conventional wisdom, which holds that the press’s naked shilling for Democratic candidates amounts to an in-kind campaign contribution. And no doubt the media’s ceaseless attacks on Donald Trump and Republicans did help round up some undecided voters. Yet the boosterism for Kamala...

"I knew the laptop records could be vetted and confirmed," Catherine Herridge says. "I was confused by what seemed a disconnect between the CBS News division and 60 Minutes." Fired CBS News investigative journalist Catherine Herridge broke her silence on "the question I get asked the most" in her newsletter Sunday: "What happened with the Hunter Biden story at CBS before the 2020 election?" The short answer is the Tiffany network did not direct the CBS News investigative unit "to develop more reporting on the laptop" in October 2020 after Herridge vetted materials including "a million dollar retainer from a...

CBS News went to great lengths to squash correspondent Catherine Herridge’s reporting about the Hunter Biden laptop just weeks before the 2020 election, the award-winning investigative journalist claimed. In her bombshell allegation, Herridge revealed she brought evidence to CBS News executive Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews and “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell in early October 2020 that the laptop contained material about “a million dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm,” along with business texts and emails from the son of Democratic challenger Joe Biden. But later that month, Herridge wrote that she was shocked to see “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl...

An ousted veteran CBS reporter has written a lengthy expose claiming to reveal details about how the network squashed a Hunter Biden story. Writing on her website, Catherine Herridge described the broadcaster's investigation into the laptop as a 'missed opportunity for CBS News', suggesting the broadcaster failed to properly report her findings. Herridge said she told company executives the laptop contained material about 'a million dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm' along with Hunter's business texts and emails in early October 2020.

On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, as the candidates sprint across the remaining swing states to issue their closing campaign messages, The View welcomed former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a lifelong Republican who’s been a very outspoken Donald Trump critic, to the table to talk about her decision to endorse and stump for Kamala Harris. The first question the panelists had for her, though, was how she reacted to the moment when Trump stated that Cheney needed to have “nine barrels shooting at her [and] let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on...

The major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) operate on free licenses of public spectrum in exchange for requirements to serve the public interest. They no longer do, and this is an obsolete model anyway. The spectrum should be auctioned off, with the proceeds used to pay down the national debt. Of course, the networks can bid on the spectrum, and they will win if broadcast networks are still the most highly valued use. What’s more likely to happen is that valuable spectrum will be reapportioned to the next generation of wireless applications, unleashing many more interesting options for consumers and...

The Trump campaign has consistently pointed to unauthorized immigration as the cause of a series of problems it says plagues the country. That is rarely actually the case.To former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, the root cause of many of the issues in the United States is simple. Be it gun violence, high housing costs, long wait times at emergency rooms or an impending depletion of disaster relief funding, Mr. Trump and Senator JD Vance have offered the same diagnosis: All are because of unauthorized immigration. “The mass migration invasion has crushed wages, crashed school systems —...